Dr A. N. Walker <Andrew.Walker@nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:>[Does anyone still use Bliss? It really did require explicit deferencing>everywhere. What a pain in the neck. -John]

But it doesn't have to be a pain in the neck. Just consider ML for
contrast. As it's a (mostly) functional language, it has pure values
(no mutation, thus no dereferences needed) and variables (called
references in ML) which are initialized on creation (val ref : 'a ->
'a ref) and are retrieved with an explicit dereference operator (val
(!) : 'a ref -> 'a) and written with a special assignment operator
(val (:=) : 'a ref -> 'a -> unit). As you use references only when you
need imperative mutation, the program is usually not very cluttered
with dereferences/assignments.